Creativity and unpredictability
Stanford Humanities Review
The Journal of Machine Learning Research
Biological Cybernetics
Dynamics and computation of continuous attractors
Neural Computation
A dynamical connectionist model of idea generation
IJCNN'09 Proceedings of the 2009 international joint conference on Neural Networks
Effects of relevant and irrelevant primes on idea generation: a computational model
IJCNN'09 Proceedings of the 2009 international joint conference on Neural Networks
A conceptual neural model of idea generation
IJCNN'09 Proceedings of the 2009 international joint conference on Neural Networks
Intuition, Insight, Imagination and Creativity
IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine
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Idea generation is a fundamental attribute of the human mind, but the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying this process remain unclear. In this paper, we present a dynamic connectionist model for the generation of ideas within a brainstorming context. The key hypothesis underlying the model is that ideas emerge naturally from itinerant attractor dynamics in a multi-level, modular semantic space, and the potential surface underlying this dynamics is itself shaped dynamically by task context, ongoing evaluative feedback, inhibitory modulation, and short-term synaptic modification. While abstract, the model attempts to capture the interplay between semantic representations, working memory, attentional selection, reinforcement signals, and modulation. We show that, once trained on a set of contexts and ideas, the system can rapidly recall stored ideas in familiar contexts, and can generate novel ideas by efficient, multi-level dynamical search in both familiar and unfamiliar contexts. We also use a simplified continuous-time instantiation of the model to explore the effect of priming on idea generation. In particular, we consider how priming low-accessible categories in a connectionist semantic network can lead to the generation of novel ideas. The mapping of the model onto various regions and modulatory processes in the brain is also discussed briefly.